Category: website Development

Speed Up Your Website ”; Previous Next Speeding up a webpage or a website is as important as finding the right hosting provider or domain name. Why? Just read the following statistics and you will change your mind. One second in page load time yields − 11% fewer page views. 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. 7% loss in conversions. Amazon found this to be true, reporting increased revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed based on their group reports. Based on the results of a study done by Akamai − 47% of people expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a website. How to Test my Website Speed? Some noted experts of this field suggest to use an online tool which is called as Webpagetest (https://www.webpagetest.org/). It is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google. It does the website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements. In our example, we will be testing the performance of tutorialspoint.com for a user from Germany using the Chrome browser. To run the test, open the URL https://www.webpagetest.org/ Type in the domain name as shown in the following screenshot − Test location – It is the country of the user location. Browser – It is to simulate users’ browser. Click “Start Test”. We will get the following results in the main page. It will show all the time needed to open the webpage with its respective elements. If we go to the Performance Review section, it will indicate which elements should be optimized. How to Speed up my Website? The basic tips to speed up your website are as follows − Minimize HTTP requests − In simple words; simplify your webpage design. Minimize server response time − As per the users’ location, the server response time changes, this is because of the distance between them. It is recommended that if most of your visitors are in one specific region, your hosting provider should be located there too, this makes the traveling distance shorter for the data. Enable Compression − Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing the HTTP response. You can do this with a tool called Gzip. Enable Browser Cache − When you visit a website, the elements of the page are stored on cache storage, so next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server. Optimize Images of your website. CSS delivery should be external if possible. The external style sheet is preferable, because it reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications. Reduce redirections which create HTTP requests. If your website is a Content Management System platform, then minimize the usage of plugins as much as possible. Remove broken links from your JavaScript, CSS and Image URLs. In the next chapter, we will learn how to advertise a webpage. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Back Up Your Website ”; Previous Next Creating a backup of your website is important because it provides insurance against all types of setbacks, such as security compromises, inadvertently deleting your site files and database corruptions. It is suggested backing up your site before you make changes each time and every time. If something goes wrong, you have a fresh copy that you know is working. It might seem like a hassle, but the first time you use a backup, you”re going to pat yourself on the back for having so much foresight. There are two ways to back up your website − Manual Automatic(through cPanel). Let us discuss both these ways to backup your website in detail. Manual Backup To manually backup your website, you can do it with a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client like we discussed previously with either – FileZilla or WinSCP. You connect your local computer to your hosting account and move files between them. To backup your website, you should just copy all the files from your hosting account to your local computer. If you have a database, create a dump file (export/backup) of it used by your account. To do so, you should access the phpMyAdmin tool (available in your cPanel). Automatic Backup To automatically backup a website we can do it through the CPanel Console, which can be done by clicking on the Backup Wizard as shown in the screenshot given below. After clicking on Backup Wizard, the next window that will show up will be like the following screenshot. It will be explaining what all will be backed up with the tools provided by the cPanel. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Configure DNS Record on a Hosting Platform ”; Previous Next DNS records are mainly used to convert domain names into servers’ IP that host this website. It is important to mention that the records are entered at domain registrars. They generally provide you with a DNS manager panel. The main purpose is that people and applications don’t have to remember big numbers to navigate to a domain. For example, www.tutorialspoint.com has an IP of 93.184.220.42, so it is easier to remember a friendly name. Pointing a Domain to an IP is done through a record. For example: www.tutorialspoint.com A 93.184.220.42 There are other types of DNS records that are used for a webpage, depending on the functions that we need to publish. S.No Type of Record & Explanations 1 A Record Connects an IP Address to a host name 2 CNAME Record Allows more than one DNS name for a host 3 MX Record Ensures email is delivered to the right location 4 NS Record Contains the name server info 5 TXT Record Provides additional info about a host or more technical info to servers 6 SRV Record Finds computers that host specific services 7 AAAA Record Provides IP addresses that do not fit a standard A Record format 8 SPF Record Used to help prevent against spam Let us now see it practically: earlier the domain tutorialspoint.online was purchased at GoDaddy, which needs to now point to an IP. For doing this, we must follow the steps given below. To begin with, you should start with entering the username and password. Then click on “Manage My Domains”. Select the Domain whose DNS should be managed by clicking on . Click on “Manage DNS “. A new window will pop up and you must then select the record that you want to enter. In this case, we should enter A Record to publish on the website. The boxes shown in the following screenshot will be opened. In the “Host” box, enter the subdomain name which will be www and in the “Points to” box enter the IP – 93.184.220.42. In the “TTL” drop box, we need to select 1 Hour, which means in one hour the record will be spread globally and the webpage will be effective. Once all this is done, click “Save”. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

E-Commerce Platforms ”; Previous Next In this chapter, we will deal with e-commerce. Which are the most popular and secure ecommerce platforms? What is needed to secure them? E-commerce is selling and buying goods and services from the internet and paying through this medium. This transaction happens between clients to business, B2B, client to client. As in between all this, there are money transactions which we should be cautious when using, or setting up e-commerce websites. Some of the top e-commerce platforms which are secure as well are listed below along with a detailed explanation about them. Magento The website link is – https://magento.com. This platform is one of the best and is developed by eBay. Magento can be easily integrated with the PayPal gateway. It has two versions– Free Version and Pay Version. The vulnerabilities are patched too fast .It has a vast variety of plugins and customization. It has SaaS solutions, which means Elastic scalability, high resilience and availability, PCI compliance, global availability and automated patching, while still maintaining flexibility in software customization that our merchants require. Shopify The website link is – https://www.shopify.com, so if you are trying to design the checkout page to be exactly how you want, Shopify is probably not for you. In fact, none of the hosted solutions will offer customizable checkout process, so you can jump the Self-Hosted section right away. Shopify has many apps that you can download and install on your store, which extend the default features or introduce new functionalities. Woocommerce The website link is – https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/. WooCommerce is a free e-commerce plugin that allows you to sell anything very practically. Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, WooCommerce is the world’s favorite e-commerce solution. It gives you both store owners and developers complete control that use WordPress templates. With endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions, WooCommerce now powers 30% of all online stores, more than any other platform. Bigcommerce The website link is – https://www.bigcommerce.com. It has over 115 e-commerce templates, unlimited product uploads, mobile view, it is perfectly integrated with amazon and eBay. It also can be integrated with most of the payment gateways. From security perspective, it is PCI compliant. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Advertise Your Webpage ”; Previous Next Once you have created your website and it is functional, then comes a very important step of marketing it. This is done to increase site visitors and to spread the word, something that can help exist on internet. The following illustration is a schematic view of all the steps that need to be done when advertising a website. Social Media Advertisement A social media advertisement is any kind of paid content on a social media network. These options run from a one-off promoted Tweet or Facebook post to a full-scale campaign with major budgets attached. Each social network offers different options, but we will discuss how to do it on Facebook because it is the biggest social media platform and the ROI of ads is about 95% on it. Facebook has around 1.4 billion users and over 900 million visits a day which makes it fit for large and small businesses. The real advantage of Facebook lies in the amount of granular data available to target users. This is because you can target your audience with various criteria such as age, location, sex, etc. For example, in this tutorial, we have mentioned many times the word Hosting. Now, if we log in to Facebook, you can see on the left hand side of the webpage an advertisement regarding hosting as shown in the screenshot below. To create a Facebook Advertisement, click on account name. Then click on Create Ads as shown in the following screenshot. A new window will open and in this you should select your objective. In our case, I will select Brand Awareness. Write the campaign name, in our case it is – tutorialspoint → then Click Create Ad Account as shown in the screenshot below. Select your account country and the currency that you want to pay Facebook as shown in the following screenshot → then Click Continue. To select your audience, you should specify the age range and the location to which this Advertisement will be shown. Scroll down and you will have options to select how this advertisement will be shown. Type text for this advertisement and upload a photo, once done → Click Place Order. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Publishing & Development Tools ”; Previous Next As you now know the fundamental necessities for developing a website as a beginner developer, you will need some tools that you should have for primary usage. Firstly, you should have a basic package of internet that has a good upload speed, minimally 1Mbps. Secondly, you should have a computer with any Operating System (it can be Linux, iOS X or Windows). Then the hardware specifications should be minimum – 1-2 GB RAM, Processor should be at least a Dual-Core one and the hard disk must be around 80 GB. The next step is – you should have a text editor that will help you for code writing and editing. Some of the best text editors for this purpose are as mentioned below. Text Sublime Text sublime can be downloaded from https://www.sublimetext.com/. It is good because the text changes the color of the parameters depending on their functions. Notepad++ Another popular text editor is Notepad ++ that can be downloaded from – https://notepad-plus-plus.org/. Editpad The next one in the list of most popular text editors is EditPad, which is another free tool. It can be downloaded from – https://www.editpadlite.com/. Note − You should always use a text editor that you feel more comfortable working on. XAMPP & LAMPP Another tool that you need to have in your computer when you are specially developing a dynamic webpage is – XAMPP for Windows OS and LAMPP for Linux OS. It has various products such as Web Apache MariaDB with phpMyAdmin for DB Management PHP and Perl Extra. If you want, you can also create an FTP Server and Mail Server with Mercury. Another similar tool like XAMPP is WAMPSERVER, which can be downloaded from the following link – http://www.wampserver.com/en/. For developers who want to code ASP should have Visual Studio provided by Microsoft. It can be downloaded from – https://www.microsoft.com/web/. If you are a beginner and you are planning to develop a flat (static) website, you should have Visual HTML text editors called WYSIWYG. One of the most commonly used editor is Macromedia Dreamweaver. It can be easily downloaded from the following link – http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html. The other tool that you need to have is FTP Client, which is used to transfer files to the Hosting Container. Generally, these FTP Clients are free and can be easily downloaded from the internet. WinSCP can be downloaded from https://winscp.net/eng/docs/guide_install. FileZilla can be downloaded from https://filezilla-project.org/download.php. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Choosing a Web Hosting Company & a Plan ”; Previous Next When choosing a Web hosting company one of the main key indicators is to see their client’s satisfactory reviews and the price which is also important. As technologies and hosting industry changes too often and fast for an expert, we should be aware to check with following criteria’s. Server Reliability / Uptime Scores – The most important point to know here is whether they have a 24×7 operating web host. You need a web host to operate on a powerful server and have stable network connections. Close to 99.5% and above is the recommended uptime score; anything below 99% is unacceptable. A company that supports Multiple Add-on Domains. Price of Hosting Signup and Renewal Cost. Hosting deals and shared hosting especially are normally selling very cheap on signup prices, but charge much higher on renewals. What Refund Policy they are offering? – If you choose to cancel your host within the trial period, what are the implications? Does the company provides a full money refund? What is the hosting company’s refund policy after the trial session? Are there any cancellation charges? Easy to use Hosting Control Panel. A user-friendly and functional hosting control panel is very important. Account Suspension – What are the limitations? Here’s a money tip that most hosting review sites will not tell you – Hosting companies will pull the plug and suspend your account if you are using too much CPU power (yes, unlimited hosting is limited) or violating the rules. Do they offer Backup. Are they free of charge? Do they have 24/7/365 Live Chat Support. Choose a Web Hosting Plan Before choosing the right hosting plan, you should know what you need, a Windows OS based hosting or a Linux OS based hosting. This choice depends on the coding language that your website has. If it is ASP, it should certainly be a Windows based hosting and should also have an IIS server installed in it. If it has any other programming languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, then you should go with Linux based hosting. After you have decided on the type of hosting (Windows or Linux), you should define the right hosting plan. You should take into consideration the following factors − Disk Space Bandwidth Number of Hosted Domains Number of Subdomains Parked Domains Versions of PHP, MySQL and Perl. The main plans in general are as follows − Shared Hosting It is the most basic plan that every hosting provider offers. Shared hosting is fundamentally many hosting accounts located on one server. Some of them share the same IP address (although a dedicated IP address is often available for an additional fee). This plan will always offer a specific set of features and will always have resource limits. If you are not certain, then it will be better to start with a limited plan and later upgrade it after the website grows and gets more traffic. VPS Hosting VPS is a Virtual Private Server. This refers to the partitioning of a physical server into multiple servers where each one acts just like a dedicated server, each has its own operating system and can be rebooted separately. These operating systems receive a specific share of the resources of the physical server and they are isolated from each other. There are two types of VPS hosting − Managed − Managed means that the patching is done by the hosting company by offering a CPanel in it. Unmanaged − Unmanaged is a hosting where you should take care of your VPS in everything and there is no CPanel in it. Dedicated Hosting This is the most powerful type of hosting, which meets the requirements and needs of big businesses. Dedicated server owners can sell hosting services for a profit. They can choose the server specifications and environment. If you have heavy traffic, a very popular site, or a large customer database, then consider Dedicated Hosting. A dedicated server also provides more freedom to send emails and stream media. TIPS − The most important thing in hosting is to check prices of different Hosting Companies and their hosting plans prices with comparison websites for a better understanding. An example of a comparison website for checking prices of hosting companies is – http://www.hostmonk.com/. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Website Development – Quick Guide ”; Previous Next Website Development – Introduction A website can be defined as a collection of several webpages that are all related to each other and can be accessed by visiting a homepage, by using a browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Google Chrome, or Opera. For example, the website address of Tutorialspoint is − www.tutorialspoint.com. Each website has its own URL which is a unique global address called domain name. A URL comprises of − The protocol used to access the website, which in this case is http, meaning port 80. It can also be https; port 443. The subdomain which by default is www. The domain name; domain names are normally chosen to have a meaning. Like in our case “tutorialspoint”, we can understand that this website offers tutorials. The suffix name which can be .com, .info, .net, .biz, or country specific. For detailed information, please refer the following Wikipedia link − https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains. The directories or in simple words, a folder in the server that holds this website. The webpage that we are looking at, in our example, it is “about_careers.htm”. Why Do We Need Websites? Websites primarily act as a bridge between one who wants to share information and those who want to consume it. If you are running a business, then it is almost imperative for you to have a website to broadcast your offerings and reach out to potential clients at a global stage. The following points explain why it is important to have a website − A website is an online brochure where you can advertise your business offers. It gives you a platform to reach out to a far-and-wide global customer base. If you are a blogger, you have the possibility to influence your readers. You can show all your ideas and publish them on a website. If you have a business idea, then you don’t have to wait. You can straightaway open an online shop and sell your products or services online. An added advantage is that the online shop will be open 24/7 for your clients, throughout the year. You can communicate with your customers, giving them an opportunity to express themselves. You can provide valuable customer support by having a trouble-ticket system. If you have an official website with a domain, then you can have your personalized email. For example, info@tutorialspoint.com (it is much better than florjan.llapi@yahoo.com). How to Setup a Website? A website is composed of several elements and while setting up a website, you would have to take care of each of them. To set up a website and make it live, you should first purchase a hosting plan. Select a domain name for this website. Point the DNS records to the server or the hosting provider. Develop the content that you want to publish on the website. Check if you need to purchase a public certificate and install it. Publish the webpage on the Internet. In the subsequent chapters of this tutorial, we will discuss each of these steps in detail. Website Development – Required Skills The skills required to set up a website can vary from very basic to the most advanced. If you are going to set up a professional website for a global audience, then you should have the following set of skills or you would have to hire a group of people to do this job for you. Content Experts Content experts supply the content that is to be published on the website. They design the content as per the requirement of the target audience and then, edit and polish the content before it gets published. Content experts normally rely on the expertise of the site designer and the webmaster. Note that the content can be text, data, images, audio or links. Website Designer A web designer is a technical person who designs and maintains the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the website. For example, where the buttons should be placed, how the images are to be displayed, etc. Graphic Designers Graphic designers develop image files that are to be included in the website. These professionals have a keen understanding of developing suitable graphics for the web environment. Web Developers Web developers create the program codes to manipulate the supplied content, based on the site design established by the website designer. A web programmer should use a set of programing languages to compile specific functions that the webpages should do in the background. Here is a set of important programing languages that a web programmer must be good at − HTML / XHTML − These are the markup languages which you will use to build your website. A web programmer must have a good understanding of HTML and XML. PHP − It is a popular programming language to develop webpages. You can collect more information on PHP on − https://www.tutorialspoint.com/php/ . PERL Script − PERL is another language which is being used to develop interactive Web Applications. If you are planning to use PERL to develop your website, then please browse our tutorial – https://www.tutorialspoint.com/perl/ to know more about PERL. Java or VB Scripts − These scripts are required to perform user-level validations and to add more interactivity to your Website. So, a web developer is required to have adequate knowledge of any of these client-side scripts. AJAX Technology − AJAX is the latest technology on the Web. Google and Yahoo are using this technology to give a better browsing experience to their website visitors. ASP or JSP − Web developers are required to be well-versed with ASP or JSP to develop interactive websites. To get more information, you can go through our tutorials on ASP and JSP at − https://www.tutorialspoint.com/asp.net/ and https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jsp/. Macromedia Flash − You can use Macromedia Flash to build a Website. It can be a little time-consuming to learn this technology, but once you learn how to use it, then you can develop attractive websites using Flash. Web Researcher You should

Website Development – Cpanel ”; Previous Next Control panel is the administration web interface of your webhosting account. It is an interface that you access to administer all the aspects of your account. You can typically control all portions of your site within the control panel without using any additional software like FTP software to upload files, though many people find it faster and easier to do so. Some web hosts use customized, proprietary control panels, but most of them use popular platforms. However, the leader of the industry is cPanel. It is the most spread out control panel among the hosting providers. The official webpage of cPanel is – https://cpanel.com. Now let us discuss cPanel in detail and understand the most important aspects of it. Firstly, to enter the CPanel you should type in the URL which the Hosting Company will give to you. This in general should be – yourdomain.com/cpanel. You should then enter your username and password which the hosting company has given you. The main dashboard will be as shown in the following screenshot, where on the left-hand side, you will see the General Information, which will show the username, domain name, home directory and the IP address of the log in. On the left towards the bottom of the screen are the Statistics like databases used, email and the add-on Domains. In the FILES section, the most important folder is of the File Manager, you can upload or download files of your webpage. The next important is FTP Accounts, where you can create users that can use programs like FileZilla to upload or download files. Taking a backup of the FILES section allows you to fully or partially download the webpage. In the DATABASES, the phpMyAdmin is the most important section which allows you to manage the database of the webpages. It can edit, add, truncate databases and tables. The MySQL Databases allows you to create and delete the databases or users. The same thing can be done step by step with the MySQL Database Wizard. In the DOMAINS section, the Addon Domains folder is an additional domain that the system stores as a subdomain of your main site. You can use these Addon Domains to host additional domains on your account. The Site Publisher is used to quickly create a website from a set of available templates. The Subdomains folder is a subsection of your website that can exist as a new website without a new domain name. In the EMAIL section, the most important folder is Email Accounts in which you can manage email accounts associated with your domain. The Metrics section is more for statistics of your website. You can see each one will give different reports for your website. In the SECURITY section, the most important folder is IP Blocker, you can block any host or network that you don’t want to give access to your website. There is also ModSecurity that is used to secure Apache. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;

Testing Your Website ”; Previous Next In this chapter, we will learn how to do some small troubleshooting of a website. Scenario − The scenario is simple – When trying to open a website there is an error which is popping up – Page cannot be displayed. Answer − This issue can be addressed by following the troubleshooting steps given below. Step 1 − Firstly, you must ensure that you don’t have an internet connection problem. You can check it by just simply trying to open another website and see if you get the same result or not. Step 2 − You have internet in your computer but the website is still not opening. You should check with the hosting provider, if your hosting plan has expired or not (maybe you forgot to pay it). You should also check with your domain registrar, if your Domain Name is still valid and it has not expired too. Step 3 − After you are done with checking the above-mentioned steps, you should check your DNS records if they are ok or not. Sometimes Hosting Providers change the DNS servers and forget to update the records. You can check this by opening CMD, type ping yourdomainname.com and if you get the following response, please check further. Ping request could not find host yourdomainname.com. Please check the name and try again. If you get the following result, then the DNS records and the server are healthy. Step 4 − Check for any database connection errors, if you are having similar errors like the screenshots shown below. To check if the database is functioning in the backend, you should have confirmation that the username, file permissions, passwords and ports of the database did not change. Step 5 − If you have a the Error 404 Not Found as shown in the following screenshot, then while opening www.yourdomainname.com, you should check if your directory structure has not changed and it is pointing on the Public_html folder. Print Page Previous Next Advertisements ”;